Response to M.K. Bhadrakumar: Don’t underestimate the ideological rigidity of American thinking

I don’t think America intended to encircle Russia because Americans simply don’t think strategically. Russians play chess, we play Monopoly. A former senior CIA official told me that Russians would come to him during the Reagan years and say, “The CIA can’t be the REAL American intelligence agency — surely there must be a secret agency standing behind it.” CIA was obviously stupid, and the Russians simply couldn’t believe that the world’s greatest superpower staffed its main intel agency with stupid people. (The official in question would gravely nod his head and tell the Russians that there was indeed a super-secret, super-elite agency buried so deep that they never would find it). American thinking is transparent; see my review of Ilan Berman’s book Implosion: The End of Russia and What It Means for America. Victoria Nuland et. al. actually believed that a democratic revolution (or something that looked like one) in Ukraine would spread to Russia and collapse the rotten hulk of the Putin regime. They also believed that democracy in Iraq would begin a wave of democratic revolutions (remember the “color revolutions”?). Hard as it is to fathom, they honestly and truly believed such drivel. I am quite sure of this: I know most of the relevant players personally. Some time ago I quoted Fyodor Lukyanov: “In Russia, most analysts, politicians and ordinary citizens believe in the unlimited might of America, and thus reject the notion that the US has made, and continues to make, mistakes in the region. Instead, they assume it’s all a part of a complex plan to restructure the world and to spread global domination. Doubts have crept in; given the chaos in the Middle East, it’s increasingly difficult to construct a conspiracy theory that proves the devilish vision of the United States.”

David Paul Goldman (born September 27, 1951) is an American economist, music critic, and author, best known for his series of online essays in the Asia Times under the pseudonym Spengler. Goldman sits on the board of Asia Times Holdings.